Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The drone booted up with an array of warning lights and system errors that made it look like a portable disco. Following instructions from India, Laks used a folding camp saw from the tool box to amputate the damaged arm. Then he taped off the cut ends of the wires that dangled from its stump. The drone, he was assured, was perfectly capable of flying with one rotor out. The damaged rotor on the other arm was a concern, but a brief flight test indicated it could still move enough air to get the drone off the ground. A few more minutes were then devoted to silencing alarms, clearing error messages, and overriding safety interlocks just to get the operating system calmed down to the point where it was willing to consider taking Laks on the next leg of the mission.

And then he was in the air, headed deeper into Texas. He hadn’t finished taking the last two nets down, but no one seemed to care about those. The good video had been shot, he guessed, and uploaded to a server in India. The cameramen were headed back down Mexico way. The overall tone of the last hour’s discourse had been that he was well behind schedule and it was a now-or-never kind of situation.

During Laks’s convalescence, after he’d come out of the coma but before they’d restored his sense of balance, they had pushed him around Cyberabad in a wheelchair. And needless to say, not being able to walk had been miserable for him. But added to it had been this other, less obvious source of annoyance, which was that he had no control over where he was going. The person pushing the wheelchair decided that. But at least in those days he’d been able to talk to that person. To ask where he was being taken, to make requests.

This felt like that. He was not actually flying the drone. He couldn’t have flown it if he’d tried, because it had no controls. As soon as he climbed in, some pilot who might be on the other side of the world—in a military compound outside of Delhi, say—made the thing take off and go wherever they wanted him next. But he couldn’t talk to that person the way he could to a wheelchair pusher.

So it was actually with some sense of relief that he watched the drone run out of juice during the flight north and make what was obviously an unscheduled emergency landing in the mountains around one o’clock in the morning.

At least the drone had what Uncle Dharmender referred to as idiot lights. That’s what they were called on the dashboard of a car. They told the driver when to check the oil or whatever. As such, they were a pillar of the family’s business; a large portion of the clan’s overall cash flow was traceable to motorists noticing idiot lights.

On this thing, they were idiot icons scattered around on a screen. But they served the same purpose. The most important of which was to prevent the occupant/pilot from being high aloft at the moment the batteries died. They had been yellow when Laks took off from the mesa, they turned orange shortly afterward, and they turned red as the drone was gaining altitude in an attempt to get over the summit of a mountain ridge. No one was bothering to tell Laks anything, but it could be inferred that said ridge stood between him and wherever it was they wanted him to be. Somewhere in the bowels of India’s military-industrial complex, people were probably getting demoted, fired, maybe even arrested right now for having failed to predict the mishap with the shell, for having miscalculated the battery charge necessary to get him over those mountains.

Anyway, the drone broke off from its laser-straight trajectory and came under what showed every sign of being manual control. After hunting and seeking around the mountainside for a few moments it settled down on an angled patch of gray scree. The red idiot light had taken to flashing on and off and counting down the seconds. It landed with six seconds of flight time remaining. Some small reserve of juice was then spent unfolding an array of photovoltaic cells. When the sun came up, this thing would begin to recharge.

It must be a huge fail for the planners of this mission but it was fine for Laks. He unbuckled himself, climbed free of the Sky Wheelchair, and strolled up-slope to a ridgeline clearly visible in moonlight a few hundred meters away. Like so many other ridgelines this did not afford him a clear vista once he had reached it, just a view to some more possible vantage points farther away. But he did get a sense that if he kept going in that direction the ground would soon break downhill and take him into lower terrain beyond. That would probably be the valley that contained the Pina2bo gun and its support complex.

As he was hiking back down to the drone, a new PowerPoint flashed up in the visor, blocking his view of the treacherous rocks ahead and nearly causing him to sprain an ankle. Laks ripped the visor off over his turban, stood still for a few moments to recover his night vision, and kept going. He’d seen just enough to read the deck’s title page:

MISSION BRIEFING

PHASE 2 (REVISED)

PERMANENT DECOMMISSIONING OF PINA2BO CLIMATE WEAPON

FLYING S RANCH, TEXAS

The moon was casting long shadows that made finding his way a bit tricky. For a few moments it crossed his mind that he might actually have gotten lost! But soon he came in view of a red light: one of the idiot icons on the drone’s screen. A troubling connection had been made in his head now between idiot lights; Uncle Dharmender, who had taught him that term, and who had implied, during their last conversation, that Laks was being kind of an idiot; and Laks himself, now using an idiot light as a guide star to find his way through the night.

Piet was a rucker, meaning a practitioner of a sport that consisted of putting on a backpack loaded with weights and then covering ground on foot in open country. When he’d first explained this shortly after his arrival in West Texas, Rufus had suspected the Dutchman was pulling his leg. It sounded to him like army boot camp stuff. As if peeling potatoes or scrubbing toilets had been made into an extreme sport. Why would a forty-year-old man like Piet do this voluntarily? Why would he consider it fun? But he had to admit it went well with Piet’s personality type. And it explained why the man had said yes to this gig out in the middle of nowhere. During the winter months, when daytime conditions here could be downright pleasant, he’d even talked Thordis and later Tsolmon into going on some of these jaunts with him. They’d always come back looking pleased with themselves. So maybe it was an easier way for a guy like Piet to relate to other humans than, say, going to a party and dancing. His rucking regimen had tapered off a bit during the summer months; he’d shifted to early mornings and it looked like his body fat percentage had skyrocketed from maybe 1 percent to 1.5 percent. But he was totally game for what had to happen next.

Piet’s ruck on tonight’s trek consisted of an earthsuit and a few liters of water. He departed after a briefing with the other falconers about the idiosyncrasies of Skippy. Skippy was chilling out in her box unaware of these goings-on, but when she awoke she’d find herself being handled by humans to whom she was not as accustomed as she was to Piet. Overhearing this conversation Rufus could tell it was mostly about Piet working through his misgivings and perhaps grief wasn’t too strong of a word re being separated from Skippy for a few hours. Duly reassured by the other falconers, he chugged a liter of water, shouldered his pack, and jogged off down the road. Rufus had equipped him with a revolver, not for humans but for feral swine. As soon as he broke free from the confines of the canyon’s nearly vertical walls, about a mile down the road, he would cut up into the lower slopes of the arc of mountains that embraced Pina2bo and traverse that until he came in view of the gun complex, probably around sunrise. He would scout things out, try to get a sense of what was happening, and try to link up with the others—in person if that was possible, using mirror flashes otherwise.